Individual residences, apartment complexes, condominium units and the like are usually provided with various services, such as natural gas, electricity and water. Charges for use of such services are typically based upon consumption. The utilities that provide such services usually provide a meter to measure consumption with respect to a particular building so that the owner of the building may be appropriately charged.
Such utilities usually provide a single meter per monitored building. This well accomodates the needs of a user solely responsible for all consumption within a particular building. The provision of a single meter, however, poses problems for persons who are only partly responsible for consumption within a monitored building, as in an apartment or condominium structure.
Such users do have the option of having the service utility install a plurality of meters so that individual usage of each particular service can be monitored in a segregated manner. This, however, constitutes a very expensive alternative.
By default, then, many such users simply divide the total usage for the building as monitored by the main meter by the number of separate units that make up the building. Variations of this simple scheme exist as well. For instance, some users may impose some other calculation-by-division sheme that takes into account square footage, insulation factors and the like. Such schemes are usually inaccurate by their very nature and hence, do not necessarily result in fair rates to the users. In addition, such schemes do not encourage conservation since users have little motivation to limit their usage of the monitored service.
Many attempts have been made to provide inexpensive submetering apparatus. Most such systems provide a plurality of clocks that measure time when the monitored commodities are being used and that are quiescent when no consumption occurs. The bill for the individual users may then be calculated.
There are problems involved in creating a fair bill from this monitoring scheme. Perhaps more importantly, such systems may be susceptible to false signals that can affect the accuracy of the measured results. Also, such submetering systems impose record keeping and bill creation duties upon a landlord that can be significant with respect to to the usage of time.
Therefore, there exists a need for a relatively inexpensive submetering apparatus that is accurate, flexible, reliable and easily maintained.